Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
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Critics' Grades and Average
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Critics' Average-
For Richer or Poorer: Patel helps Pinto keep her chin up
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Credits
Limited Release: Nov 07, 2008; Rated: R; Length: 120 Minutes; Genres: Comedy,
Drama; With: Anil Kapoor and Dev Patel
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By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
In Slumdog Millionaire, directed by the whiz-bang fabulist Danny Boyle
(Trainspotting, Sunshine), Jamal (Dev Patel), an 18-year-old
Indian orphan who has spent his life scavenging on the streets, lands as a
contestant on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,
and he wins — big. Don't worry, I'm not giving anything away: An
opening title informs us that he wins 20 million rupees (in U.S.
currency, that translates roughly as...an awesome amount of cash). The
host (Anil Kapoor), who looks like Omar Sharif if he'd been a high-end
vacuum-cleaner salesman, models his act on the British version of the
show, which may be why he's a lot more condescending than the courtly
Regis Philbin. Mercilessly, he mocks Jamal for being a ''chaiwalla'' (a
boy who serves tea — extremely low on the class totem pole). Yet the
kid
is immune to insults — or, it seems, nerves — and he becomes a folk
hero as he keeps knocking out those impeccable final answers.
The prospect of an uneducated orphan from the slums of Mumbai
winning a pot of gold on a game show that hinges on worldly knowledge
is, of course, the stuff of purest fairy tales. Based on Vikas Swarup's
novel
Q & A, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), Slumdog Millionaire is
nothing
if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish
fulfillment. It's like the Bollywood version of a Capra fable sprayed
with colorful drops of dark-side-of-the-Third-World squalor. A framing
device has Jamal being interrogated by Mumbai cops who want him to
confess how he won
the show (they believe, wrongly, that he cheated). To let us know how
he won, the film keeps flashing back from Jamal's stint on Millionaire
to scenes of his life as an innocently scheming Dickensian ragamuffin.
Orphaned during a riot, the young Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar)
skips around India with his older brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed
Ismail), the two boys scrambling to survive in a bustling, hothouse
landscape of exploitative treachery. They're detained, along with a
bunch of other orphans, by a vile crook who doesn't just use them as
beggars; in a touch to give Fagin the willies, he likes to blind his
orphans by pouring boiling liquid into their eyes, because then they'll
earn more sympathy from passersby. The two escape, along with a girl,
Latika (Rubina Ali), whom Jamal falls for and keeps trying to rescue.
But just as we're reeling from this close encounter with evil, the
movie reveals its true, happy design: This episode, and others like it,
provides Jamal with the precise piece of information — in this case, a
song title — he'll draw on, years later,
to answer the questions on Millionaire. The
inventor of the revolver, the figure on a $100 bill (he learns that one
while scamming U.S. tourists at the Taj Mahal)— all the knowledge he'll
need is offered by his life of hardship.
As Slumdog Millionaire jumps from the fear and degradation
of Jamal's childhood to the snippet of game-show victory each episode
provides, the audience relaxes, secure in the knowledge that the
hardship and cruelty
on display are, in their way, as much of a fairy tale as the mad-money
TV triumph they
presage. Slumdog Millionaire is brash and lively and compulsively
watchable, but with Boyle working at full boil, it is also an unabashed
concoction — a movie that turns the horror of broken Indian childhoods
into a whooshingly blithe, in-your-face picaresque. Not since Les Miz have you
felt this gooey-good about kids whose lives were this bad.
We follow Jamal and Salim at three different ages (with two sets of
nicely matched tyke actors), but it's when Jamal is
18, and played by Dev Patel, that the movie takes on a touch of
gravitas. Patel is tall, with a serious thin mouth, sloping eyebrows,
and a wiry boyish toughness rather like that of Shia LaBeouf; he holds
the camera while appearing to do nothing — the mark of a star. Madhur
Mittal, as the older Salim, is a study in contrast — a permed weakling
who goes to work for a gangster — but I wish the grown-up Latika
(Freida Pinto), whom Jamal finds enslaved to that same thug, looked
less like a supermodel. It's all part of the movie's fanciful
sentimental tidiness. Slumdog Millionaire rousingly
celebrates the escape from the slums, but since it’s Jamal’s childhood
that allows him to win big on TV (and to win that girl), you could also
say that the movie ennobles poverty. BDanny Boyle and Dev Patel talk about
Slumdog Millionaire
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20239800,00.html
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